


Magnified And Sanctified

by Pargoletta



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Historical References, Jewish Character, Jewish Steve Rogers, Judaism, Memory, Rituals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-15
Updated: 2015-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-14 19:57:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4577901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pargoletta/pseuds/Pargoletta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A synagogue is a place of prayer, of study, and of community.  Living in a new century, but beset by memories of the old, Steve Rogers needs all three.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magnified And Sanctified

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Val Mora (valmora)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/valmora/gifts).



> Welcome to this story! An idea came, and I thought [valmora](http://archiveofourown.org/users/valmora) would like to read it. Sometimes, it’s as simple as that.
> 
> This is set, as a friend of mine would say, in a place and at a time. The place is New York, and the time is a moment prior to _The Winter Soldier_.
> 
> A tallit, or tallis, as Steve pronounces it (more on that at the end) is a prayer shawl. It’s usually worn by men, but some women in the more progressive movements wear them. And some men in the progressive movements don’t wear them. However, Steve is from a time and place where men wore them regularly.
> 
> The chant that Steve enjoys is [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3lcuzLjtDk).
> 
> Enjoy!

**Magnified And Sanctified**

 

 

The world was soft and white around Steve, shining with a diffuse glow. For an instant, so brief that there was no time for the tiny seed of panic to bloom, it almost seemed like snow, but his other senses rallied, and registered the slightly scratchy warmth of lightweight wool, the rustle of embroidery, and the smell of lacquered wood overlaid with the hint of someone else’s cologne. Steve breathed in and out, as Bruce had taught him, allowing himself to feel the loneliness that accompanied this action these days, and then settled the tallis around his shoulders. He checked to make sure that his kippah – black velvet, like the ones he had admired as a kid and could never afford – was still clipped firmly to his hair, and slid into a chair at the back of the sanctuary.

The rabbi flashed a quick, warm smile at the gathering congregation from his seat near the ark, while the cantor rose and took her place at the large lectern. She began to sing, in her warm, soft mezzo, almost singing to herself, but just loud enough for the congregation to hear, register, and begin to join the hypnotic melody of the chant. It was nothing that Steve remembered from his childhood, but it had been easy enough to learn. _“My strength, with the song of God_ , _will be my salvation.”_

One sentence, six Hebrew words. Not the six that he had been taught since before he could talk, that he had barely managed to gasp out before the crunch of ice and metal and glass, the shower of sparks, and the shock of freezing water, and which still caused a flutter in his stomach. This new sentence was just as simple, just as much something that he could believe in. He could sing along, quietly, in his chair, and the tension of getting through another week in a world that was too bright, too smooth, and moved too fast would drain from his muscles, until he was ready to hear the rabbi’s words of welcome.

He had Natasha and Tony to thank for finding this particular shul. He had tried to do it on his own, and had stayed up late into the night using his new Internet skills to track down what had become of his old shul in Brooklyn. The building was now a Baptist church, and the congregation had moved to an imposing concrete structure that was all oddly placed curves and abstract stained glass. There had been guitars and a tambourine, and a blue and white flag, and it had been warm and pretty and welcoming, and so foreign that Steve had to walk out so that he wouldn’t break down in public. He hadn’t intended to tell anyone on the team, but there was a reason that Natasha had been a spy. She had managed to get the entire story out of him with nothing more than a sympathetic look and a glass of wine at just the right moment, when they were alone in the tower on a Friday night, and Steve had nowhere to go.

Natasha was subtle, Steve had to give her that. The first he knew of her plan was when Tony knocked on his door a few weeks later.

“Put on a tie, Cap. We’re going somewhere.”

“We?”

“Nat and I put our heads together. Come on.”

Too curious to argue, Steve grabbed a tie from his closet and followed Tony. Which was how he found himself, half an hour later, sitting in the office of Rabbi David Bloch, listening as Tony talked about space, and time, and quiet, and many other things that Steve would never have guessed that Tony knew the first thing about.

Rabbi Bloch was considerably younger than the rabbis Steve had known as a boy, and clean-shaven to boot. His speech was easy and entirely without any cadence of pedantry. But his eyes were kind, and he asked no questions of Steve, merely pointing out the rack by the door from which Steve could choose a tallis and a kippah. By the time Steve emerged from the soft cocoon of wool, Tony was gone, and a greeter was smiling at him, offering no more than a friendly “Shabbat shalom.”

Neither Tony nor Natasha said anything about it for the rest of the week, but Steve was entirely unsurprised when the lights in the gym shut off slightly earlier than usual on Friday afternoon. He returned to his quarters to find the plain black velvet kippah sitting on his dresser with a note propped against his mirror.

_You should have your own. You don’t want anyone else’s hair gunk on yours._

_N_

That was all that any of them would say about the matter.

They had chosen well, Steve had to admit. The congregation was big enough that Steve didn’t feel conspicuous, but small enough that he didn’t feel lost, either. He could tell that they knew exactly who he was, but somehow, between Tony and Rabbi Bloch, they knew not to ask questions, and allowed Steve to sit in the back, and they never did make fun of his Hebrew, even when his accent clashed with theirs and his soft hiss floated through their crisper articulation. Perhaps one day, when he felt more comfortable, he might allow them to call him to the Torah. But not yet.

 

 

Working services into his weekly routine was not difficult, nor had Steve anticipated that it would be. After the first two or three weeks, the rhythm of the shul began to be, if not familiar, at least known and anticipated. He began to recognize faces in the congregation, and people greeted him, not as the famous Captain America of the Avengers, but as one of the regular shul-goers. And so, to his surprise, Steve found himself making acquaintances. He had liked Rabbi Bloch from the beginning, but he found that he could really talk to the cantor, Debbie Landauer, once he got past the novelty of hearing her chant prayers. She was personable and lively, and seemed equally happy to chat with him after services or to let him sit quietly in her office for a while, clutching a glass of water, trying and failing to find the words for all the questions he was still not ready to ask.

Towards the middle of January, the service bulletin announced that Emma Richter would become bat mitzvah the following Saturday. Steve was immediately intrigued. A year or two before Bucky’s draft notice had come, he and Steve had been playing cards in the Barnes’s kitchen when Ida raced in with a letter.

“I got invited to a party!” she cried, waving it in front of Bucky’s face.

“Good for you,” Bucky said with a laugh. “There gonna be boys there?”

Ida shrugged and handed him the letter. Bucky read it, then raised his eyebrows and gave a low whistle. Steve glanced over his shoulder and frowned.

“What’s a bas mitzvah? You ever heard of that, Buck?”

Bucky shrugged. “I guess it’s like a bar mitzvah for girls. Becca said that some of the real ritzy shuls in Manhattan are having them.” He handed the letter back to Ida. “You’ll have to tell us all about it.”

Ida beamed. “It’s probably something fancy. You think it’ll be fancy enough that Becca’ll let me wear her blue dress?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky laughed. “You go ask her.” Ida scampered off into the next room, and Steve had to smile at the idea that little Ida was actually tall enough to start wearing Becca’s clothes.

He was smiling again as he read about Emma Richter after the service was over, the bulletin in one hand, and a black-and-white cookie in the other. “Bat mitzvah,” he said softly, clicking his tongue on the hard “t” sound.

“You should come,” Cantor Landauer said, licking icing from her own cookie off her fingers. “It’s always a great atmosphere, and the families love when everyone comes.”

Steve smiled. “Okay,” he said, just like that, just like someone who was really a part of this shul.

 

 

He thought of Ida while he got dressed on Saturday morning, and wondered if she had, in fact, gotten to wear Becca’s blue dress. In her honor, he selected a blue tie, made sure his shirt was starched, and his shoes were shined. Clint gave a mock wolf-whistle when Steve emerged from his room, but Steve just laughed and tossed a rude hand gesture in Clint’s general direction.

“Big day, Cap?” Tony called.

“Yup. Little girl’s doing her thing, and I’m aiming to be there to see it.”

The shul was already crowded when Steve arrived, and he wasn’t sure that he’d find a seat, but someone moved a coat, and Steve slid into the row. He wrapped himself in his tallis with his customary deep breath. He was sure there was a blessing that he should be saying, one that he could remember Bucky’s father saying, but he had long since forgotten it. He reminded himself to ask Cantor Landauer about it at some point, but then the woman herself began to sing, and Steve sat down and opened the prayer book.

Emma Richter was tall for her age, and this was the first time that Steve had seen her without one of her ever-present paperback novels with dragons on the cover. She stood at the lectern between Rabbi Bloch and Cantor Landauer for the whole service, and read a short passage from what Steve assumed was a popular children’s novel in lieu of a study passage. Cantor Landauer explained that Emma chose the passage after a great deal of thought and preparation, and spoke about a community service project that Emma had undertaken. Steve had to admit that he was enjoying this service a great deal more than he had enjoyed his own bar mitzvah, in which his Torah reading had just been another moment in the service, entirely unremarkable.

He rose to his feet along with the rest of the congregation and watched as two women, identified in the bulletin as Emma’s aunt and cousin, opened the ark. Cantor Landauer reached inside and selected not the red-robed Torah scroll that Steve had seen used every week so far, but another scroll, much smaller, robed in black. Intrigued, he watched it as it processed through the congregation, as Emma’s little brother undressed it, and as Emma’s father raised it for display and then laid it on the lectern. Before she called Emma to the Torah, Cantor Landauer faced the congregation and made a little speech.

“Today, Emma Richter becomes bat mitzvah,” she said. “As is the custom in our community, all of our b’nei mitzvah kids read from this Torah scroll. It was rescued from a Czech community that was destroyed in the Holocaust, and it has come to us in New York for safekeeping. Our children read from it in remembrance of those children who never had the chance to become bar or bat mizvah, and to celebrate the life of the Jewish people that was not completely extinguished during the Second World War.”

And with that, Steve was gone. His open eyes registered Emma stepping forward, chanting the blessing in her high little-girl’s voice, and beginning to read, but her voice in his ears became the voice of Bucky’s mother, worrying about her sister back in Kovno, the voices of his commanding officers debating whether to send the Howling Commandos to raid a HYDRA arms depot or to sabotage a rail line in Poland, the voices of certain of his fellow soldiers grumbling darkly about the Army’s priorities and the failings of the President, and Bucky’s final scream as he was torn away from the side of a freight train hurtling through the mountains.

Through sheer force of will, Steve managed to hold himself together through Emma’s reading, and through her older sister reading the Haftorah. A wave of nausea passed through him as the Torah was ceremonially passed down the generations, from Emma’s grandmother to her mother and then to her, and at last, he could bear it no longer. As the congregation passed handfuls of candy around, he twisted in his seat to find the door, and sprinted for the hallway just as Emma stepped down from the lectern in a shower of candy and laughter.

 

 

Some time later, Steve came back to himself to find that he was covered in cold sweat, huddled on the floor in a corner of Cantor Landauer’s office. He raised his head and looked around, wondering how he had gotten there, and how long he had been sitting on her floor.

He must have made a noise or caught his breath, because Cantor Landauer came to him and pressed a glass of water into his hands. Steve took it, but found that his hand was shaking too hard for him to raise the glass to his mouth to drink.

“I am so sorry, Steve,” Cantor Landauer said. “In all the excitement of Emma’s aliyah, it never even occurred to me that you might have a problem. I should have warned you about our Czech Torah scroll, and I apologize from the bottom of my heart.”

Steve wanted to accept her apology, to reassure her that he did not blame her – after all, how many newly returned veterans of his war were running around in New York, really? – and offer his own apology for running away from Emma’s celebration. But somehow, the only words that came out of his mouth were, “My tallis is gone.”

“Mark brought it in,” Cantor Landauer said, almost smiling but not quite. “It must have fallen off in the hallway. Would you like to put it on?”

Steve nodded, so Cantor Landauer brought it to him from where it had been sitting, neatly folded, on a chair. Steve unfolded it and clutched it in his hands, trying to will his hands to stop shaking, trying not to cry, trying to remember the blessing. But the only thing that came to his mind was a memory of being little, and standing on one side of Bucky’s father in shul while Bucky stood on the other side, and Bucky’s father put on his tallis, passing it over his head in a great swirl of white so that, for a moment, all three of them were alone together beneath the fabric, and it was as close to being a father’s son as Steve had ever been.

He wrapped the tallis around his shoulders and pulled it close, allowing the fabric to hold him tightly inside his body. Cantor Landauer closed the door to her office and sat down at her desk, as she had done before. She let him sit silently in the corner until he stopped shaking, and she could call Natasha to come pick him up and take him back to the tower.

 

 

Steve let several days go by while he thought about what to do and how to do it. One of the great blessings of this century was e-mail, which combined the immediacy of a telephone call with the space for reflection of a letter. On Wednesday afternoon, Steve e-mailed Cantor Landauer, sweating bullets over what ended up as a brief note asking if he could come to her office to talk. She replied an hour later, inviting him to stop by the next morning.

“Welcome,” she said on Thursday morning, when Steve knocked on the door. “Come on in and sit down. How are you feeling?”

Steve could feel the blush spreading over his face. “Better, thank you. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“If it does, it won’t be your fault,” Cantor Landauer said. “It’s funny. We spend so much time worrying about how to welcome back soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, but your situation isn’t quite the same. I’ll keep an eye out, and we’ll do better next time.”

“Next time.”

She sighed. “Yeah. This week – tomorrow, actually – we’re remembering the liberation of Auschwitz.”

Steve frowned a little as he pieced together what he knew about that name. Some of it was vague, half-remembered memories of reports and rumors, and some of it was stories that he had read in books and watched in documentaries. “I know about Auschwitz,” he offered. “I don’t . . . know enough. Maybe someone – would you, Cantor, please – tell me? That way . . . I’d know.”

Cantor Landauer looked at Steve for a moment, and then a smile spread across her face. “Steve,” she said, “it would be my privilege. And, please, call me Debbie.”

 

 

Two hours later, Steve’s head was spinning, and Debbie Landauer called a stop to the lesson. “I think you know enough that what happens tomorrow won’t catch you off guard,” she said.

“I need to know everything,” Steve replied.

Debbie shook her head. “You need time to process what you’ve learned. We can do this again. I will absolutely teach you everything you want to know. But not all at once. Even with the kids, we don’t do it all at once.”

Steve leaned forward and buried his face in his hands. He emerged after a moment and caught Debbie’s worried gaze. “Tony set me up with this movie,” he said. “It was before he brought me here. I was still trying to find out what happened to the fellows from my unit. One of them was in the movie. Tim Dugan, Dum Dum, we called him. Except he was an old man.” Steve had to stop and take a ragged breath just at the memory of that shock, of Dum Dum with thin white hair and glasses and a quavering, elderly voice.

“What happened to Dum Dum?” Debbie asked.

“It was a movie about . . . this.” Steve waved his hand to take in the books and pictures on Debbie’s desk. “After I . . . well, after, Dum Dum was reassigned to a new unit. He was talking about liberating a camp called . . . was there one called Buchenwald?”

Debbie nodded.

“He was talking about what he saw when he walked in. While he was talking, they showed these pictures – I couldn’t make sense of them. I had no idea what I was seeing. And then, in the movie . . . Dum Dum started to cry. I couldn’t watch any more.” Steve’s hands were shaking, and he clasped them together. “Maybe I should try again.”

Debbie smiled. “Not tonight. You’ve had enough for today, and you need to go do something else.” She glanced at the calendar on the wall near her desk. “Why don’t you come back on Tuesday morning? Bring the movie. We can watch it together, if you’d like.”

“Yeah.” Steve nodded. “I’d like that.”

“Will we see you tomorrow evening for the service?”

“I think so.” Steve glanced away but couldn’t stop his lips from curling into the beginning of a smile. “I might sit near the back, though. Just in case.”

“I completely understand.”

Steve rose to his feet. “Thank you, Cantor.”

“Debbie, please.”

“Debbie.”

She held out her arms to him, and he walked into her embrace with only a moment to wonder at how weird it was to be hugging a cantor, and one who reminded him of Bucky’s mom at that. After she released him, he put on his jacket and was almost at the door when he remembered that there was one other thing he’d been meaning to ask her about.

“Debbie, I used to know this, but I’ve forgotten. I know there’s a blessing you’re supposed to say when you put on your tallis, but I can’t remember what it is.”

She told him. It was ridiculously simple, and he might have figured it out himself, if he’d had the energy to spare from thinking about everything that was different now.

 

 

The service on Friday evening was difficult, but Steve was prepared. He had his tallis, which still reminded him of Mr. Barnes, and he had Debbie’s lesson, the warm glance that she aimed at him from the lectern, and the promise of more time to confront the horrors of his past and the world’s. And, to his surprise, he had Emma Richter, who looked at him shyly across the aisle and whispered “Are you okay?” just as Rabbi Bloch finished his talk about liberation. He was able to make it through the service without fleeing, and he was even able to stay behind and socialize for a few minutes afterward.

He spent all of Saturday and half of Sunday in his bed, devoid of energy. He would have had no human contact at all, except that Tony, who had no sense of boundaries, especially in his own tower, barged in on him on Sunday morning and spent half an hour patiently spooning a bowl of Campbell’s Chicken and Stars soup down Steve’s throat. Steve allowed it because Tony said nothing at all, and when he decided that Steve had consumed enough soup, he drew the blanket up over Steve’s shoulders and left.

As they had agreed, Steve brought a copy of the movie about the camps to Debbie on Tuesday, and they watched it together. They watched the entire movie, in little chunks with breaks in between so that Debbie could tell Steve about the partisans, and Steve could tell Debbie about the Howling Commandos, and so that Steve could press his fingers against his eyes and take deep, gasping breaths, because they had to finish the movie before he could cry. Afterwards, Steve arranged to come for lessons for the next three mornings.

“Are you sure you’re up for so much at once?” Debbie asked.

Steve thought for a moment. “No,” he admitted. “But there’s something I have to do on Friday night that’ll be harder than all of these lessons. I figured I’d sort of . . . work up to it.”

“All right.” Debbie handed him a tissue. “But take care of yourself. You’re a part of this community, and I don’t want you to be any more hurt than you are.”

 

 

On Friday morning, Debbie had some records of Israeli folk songs, but Steve shook his head. “There’s something else,” he said.

“What?”

“I don’t need a lesson today. I just need – some encouragement, I guess.”

Debbie nodded, and slipped the record back into its cardboard sleeve. “Today’s your difficult thing, you said.”

“Yeah.”

“Will you tell me what it is? Maybe we can work out a plan together.”

Steve shook his head. “No. Gotta do this on my own. I think – you’ll know when I do it. If I can be brave enough by tonight.”

“I think you will be,” Debbie said. “I know I haven’t known you for very long, but I think you have remarkable courage. If you want to do this, you’ll find the strength when the time comes.”

“Will we sing that chant tonight?” Steve asked. “The one about strength and God and salvation?”

Debbie smiled. “I think that could happen. Would you like to sing it together now?”

It was a tempting offer, and Steve considered it seriously for a moment. “No,” he said at last. “Tonight will be better. See you then?”

“See you then.”

 

 

That evening, Steve took a deep breath. He murmured the blessing and wrapped himself in his tallis. There was the instant of snow, the instant of panic. Steve thought of the old shul in Brooklyn, and of Mr. Barnes, and of Bucky, and the moment passed, and he sat down. Rabbi Bloch smiled at the gathering congregation. Debbie stepped up to the lectern and began to sing, just loud enough to quiet the crowd and encourage them to sing along. _“Ozi v’zimrat Yah, va’yehi li l’shua.”_ She kept the chant going long enough that Steve could take a few breaths and join in, though his mouth was dry with nerves.

The regular Friday night service passed through Steve’s ears, but he only registered enough to know when to stand and when to sit. All of his attention was focused on the one moment that would come in its time. He had told none of the others, not even Natasha or Tony, what he was planning to do, on the theory that they would be less helpful beforehand than supportive afterwards. He was beginning to regret that decision, but it was too late now. He hoped that they actually would be supportive when he got back to the tower.

The Aleinu finished, and Steve pulled his tallis closer around his body. Rabbi Bloch stepped up to the lectern. He read a passage that spoke of the emptiness of loss, of the limits of memory, and the need to live as an homage to the dead. Then he read a long list of names. “If anyone present is observing a yahrzeit, I invite you to add those names to our list,” he said. As his gaze slowly swept across the sanctuary, a few people murmured names.

“Esther Nathan.”

“My grandfather, Mordechai ben Yitzhak.”

“Raymond and Lois Saperstein.”

Steve raised his head, and his gaze met Rabbi Bloch’s.

“James Barnes.”

Debbie nodded to him, so small that he might have missed it, but he did not.

Rabbi Bloch raised his hands to invite the congregation to stand. “Let us join our hearts with those who mourn, as we say the words of the Kaddish.”

Steve bent his head over his prayer book. His eyes began to sting, and at last, there was no need to suppress it, no more need to shove the tears away for later. He could speak freely now, in the Hebrew of a time long dead.

_“Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei raba . . .”_

The words didn’t take the grief away. But, he decided later, curled up on the couch in the tower with a mug of cocoa in his hands, Natasha lounging next to him, Clint puttering in the kitchen, and Bruce and Tony idly arguing a few feet away, they did allow him to spread the burden around and allow friendly hands to help him bear the weight.

 

 

END

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to those who have read and enjoyed this! A quick note about Steve’s Hebrew. Being brought up entirely before 1970, Steve’s Hebrew is of an old-fashioned Ashkenazi flavor. The accent is a little bit different than what’s taught in most progressive synagogues today, and there is one letter, _taf_ , that’s pronounced like a “t” in modern Hebrew, but often like an “s” in Ashkenazi Hebrew. It’s the letter that ends the word “tallit,” which Steve pronounces as “tallis,” and the “bat” in “bat mitzvah,” which Steve pronounces as “bas mitzvah” the first time he hears about one. The switch in pronunciation in American synagogues happened around 1967 – 1970, so there are still people who pray in an old-fashioned accent, and you can hear the “s” floating above the rest of the prayers sometimes. Steve isn’t alone in this, although (to the shock of nobody at all) he does sound like someone’s grandpa when he prays.


End file.
